Once again, Net Applications has come out with its end-of-month report on Web browser usage, and once again, Google Chrome's popularity continued to grow in January. The search company's Web browser gained 0.72 percent of the worldwide share for a total of 10.70 percent, topping the 10 percent mark for the first time.

While Internet Explorer dropped overall, version 8 of Microsoft's browser continued to gain ground, growing by 1.18 percent from 33.02 percent to 34.17 percent, maintaining its position as the most widely used browser on earth. Previous versions continued to decline, with IE6 falling from 13.06 percent to 11.43 percent, and IE7 from 8.76 to 8.29.

This table summarizes the browser trends from December 2010 to January 2011:

Browser

December 2010

January 2011

Percent Change

Internet Explorer

57.08

56.00

-1.9

Firefox

22.81

22.75

-0.3

Chrome

9.98

10.70

+7.2

Safari

5.89

6.30

+7.0

Opera

2.23

2.28

+2.2

Firefox nearly held steady, shaving just 0.06 percent off its market share, while smaller players Safari and Opera both made modest gains, with Apple's browser adding 0.41 percent and the Nordic browser adding 0.05 percent to its share. The Apple increase was nearly as large as Chrome's in terms of percent increase, at 7.0 percent, compared with 7.2 for Google's browser.

The Internet Explorer 9 Beta passed half a percent of overall Internet usage, and accounted for 1.82 percent on Windows 7 systems. In a Windows Blog post, Roger Capriotti, Microsoft's director of Internet Explorer product, wrote, "IE9 has been downloaded over 23 million times.... We are pleased to see users continue to leverage Windows 7 capabilities together with IE9 for a more beautiful web experience." The last part was referring to extra capabilities such as pinned sites and jump lists, only available in Windows 7.

Capriotti also noted site developers increasingly taking advantage of these IE9 features, saying "more partners are coming online every day, including Gilt, Hi5, and Huffington Post most recently." It's widely expected that Microsoft will fully launch the browser next week at an event in San Francisco.

PCMag.com contacted Google and Mozilla, makers of Firefox, for comment on the market share data, but we have not yet received responses.

About the Author

Michael Muchmore is PC Magazine's lead analyst for software and web applications. A native New Yorker, he has at various times headed up PC Magazine's coverage of Web development, enterprise software, and display technologies. Michael cowrote one of the first overviews of web services for a general audience. Before that he worked on PC Magazine's S... See Full Bio

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